Two Cheers For Sequester

Hysteria is rampant inside the Beltway, as politicians and their media fanboys contemplate the unheard-of possibility that federal spending may not rise very much this year. The horror! I’m guessing that outside the confines of America’s last boom town, the idea of cutting federal spending sounds pretty good. Most voters are probably skeptical that it will really happen, given the federal government’s iron grip on our wallets, and they may be right. But my own view, that the biggest problem with sequestration is that it doesn’t cut enough, is, I suspect, widely shared.

Sure, the administration will try to make the cuts as noticeable and annoying to the public as possible. And, sure, the state-controlled media will abet the administration’s deceptions. (Covering up news has replaced reporting news as the liberal media’s principal purpose.) But at some level, reality is hard to overlook. The idea that a miniscule cut–i.e. reduction of the increase–in federal spending represents some kind of crisis is ludicrous.

While sequestration isn’t perfect, it is by far the best option on the table, given the Democrats’ intransigence, and Republicans should embrace it. Many Republican officeholders don’t seem to understand that the biggest knock on Republicans is not that they are too “extreme,” it is that they continually fail to achieve the objectives on which they campaign. So if voters believe that the GOP has succeeded in bringing about meaningful cuts in the federal budget, hallelujah! Nothing could be better for the Republican brand.